I’m
always gratified to see the new issue of Fence magazine. The latest issue of the semi-annual poetry and fiction journal Fence is issue #30 (Winter/Spring 2015),
and has so much writing in it that poems are included on the front and back
cover, and the author biographies are only available through either scanning
the code through your phone or writing the journal directly (which I understand,
logically, but simply find annoying as a reader). Either way, it is remarkable
to see a journal inventive enough to include the two poems by John Ashbery on their
front and back cover instead of inside the issue, thus solving the frustration
of lack of space. I really can’t think of another journal that has done such,
although I know that the text of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House
Press, 1987; Coach House Books, 2004) [see my review of such here] was
constructed (and produced) to begin on the front cover, and end on the back
cover.

One
thing I’ve always appreciated about Fence
is their adherence to publishing the work of any writer only once over a two
year period; coupled with their strong editorial mandate, this has meant that
one of Fence’s ongoing strengths is
the ability to introduce even their long-standing readers to a wide variety of
new writers. Some of what leapt out at me included the unapologetically open-heart
cadences of Tina Brown Celona’s three poems (“now to sing / so that even you //
will stop to listen / in the moonlight // we walk in / I’ve never seen such
whiteness // where poetry is the only language / and the only speech we hear”),
or the striking staccato of Wong May’s three poems, that include:

As
usual, there is far too much to discuss in detail, but the new issue includes
some familiar names included as well, including Chris Martin, Carla Harryman,
Bin Ramke, Joshua Ware, Seth Abramson, Andrea Actis, Ben Doller, Maureen
Seaton, Jeff Hilson (I haven’t seen work from Hilson in quite a long time) and
Rick Moody, as well as an extended section of Julie Carr’s remarkable “REAL
LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” (a work-in-progress she discussed last year at Touch the Donkey), that includes:

%

Consider for a moment
images of the divine, and the ban placed upon them. Since in what I’ll call my
tradition there are no such images we depend entirely on language and the body.
This means there are many songs, many prayers, some rocking, and much ritual. Children
are at once glad and annoyed by this. If we were to construct an image, what
would it be? A mother? A goat? A tree? Impossibly, we’d have to have all three,
which would return us to something that precedes us, throw us back to fathers
who never once knew we were truly theirs and so fed us reluctantly, counting
our morsels. Everything we’ve forgotten how to do, any ritual unpracticed or
unknown, remains like a residue on the table. Stroking the wood, we retrieve
these forgotten things.